ColdFusion 8: officially launched and expensive. Oficialmente lançado e caro.

Today, Adobe officially released ColdFusion 8. The community is making a big noise against the price policy for the software. Something that I just saw before reading the messages from developers in Brazil CF mailing list. Now, developers from Europe, USA, Japan, Australia and so on are very mad on this subject.

Adobe lançou hoje oficialmente no seu site a mais nova versão do ColdFusion Application Server versão 8. A chiadeira foi geral na comunidade sobre os preços abusivos praticados pela Adobe. Uma queixa que era comum no Brasil e em outros paises do terceiro mundo agora se repete tambem em desenvolvedores da Europa, Estados Unidos, Japão, Australia e por ai vai.

This price policy is like a big hit on developer's face from Brazil and third world countries. Since long time ago they still debate and try to use CF on web projects, fighting alone to justify the high price on license and hosting to theirs clients.

Essa politica de preço é como um grande murro na face dos desenvolvedores brasileiros que já alguem tempo debatem sobre isso e lutam sozinhos para poder utilizar o CF nos projetos web.

Some developer, specially the ones connected to Adobe argue that this high price for CF Enterprise does not matter since only few enterprise level really need the enterprise version and can easily pay for it. This is totally wrong specially because the Sandbox Security feature is still only available in the Standard Version.

Alguns desenvolvedores, principalmente ligados a Adobe contestam ainda que o preço alto é somente no CF Enterprise que é utilizado muito pouco. Ora, uma das principais qualidades do Enterprise, além da performance elevada, era a capacidade de usar o Sandbox Security que possibilida empresas de hosting utilizarem o CF em ambiente de hosting compartilhado. E essa "feature" não foi adicionada à versão standard.

So, the CF shared hosting scenario will still face the same problem: to compete with PHP and ASP hosting plans.

I hope Adobe can soon review the price policy... but I know I am a dreamer.

Então, o cenário de hospedagem compartilhada usando ColdFusion vai continuar encarando o mesmo problema: Competir com hospedagens em PHP e ASP.

Eu tenho esperança que a Adobe revise essa política de preço... mas eu sei que sou um sonhador.

P.S. 1: After reviewing some blogs on this subject I would like to add a note about my opinion on CF 8 release. We love CF and we want to see more people using it. I am frustrated for only one single feature that is on Enterprise edition but not on Standard: SANDBOX SECURITY. That alone would make hosting companies to offer CF shared plans in a reliable and stable environment, resulting in a big boost on CF popularity. I would love to see a Hosting Edition to CF that could help increase the CF community all over the world. Perhaps I am a dreamer and still need to hear from clients comments like: "This is that only guy that does that ColdFusion thing". And one last opinion. Just because I criticize Adobe price police for CF does not mean I didn't like CF8 new features. I love it. I was just expecting more... Forta himself once said Adobe (at the time of the MM merge) was going to make CF a lot more popular in the web development industry I just can't see how that is going to happen by raising prices